Betrayal's Mark
by hazytwinkle
Summary: Regulus one shot...incidentally he dies. It manages to talk about Siriu and Blaise Zabini too. No actual pairings, although it is rated M for sex and such. Nothing is too explicit and I think a T rating would work, but M for safety.


Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine. JKR owns them along with the rest of the element of the Harry Potter series.

A/N: This is a random idea that popped into my head…not likely, but not impossible either. It's a Regulus dies fic and relies heavily on the notion that he is more than just a deserter, but also a traitor.

Betrayal's Mark

He had forgotten how soft lips could be. By now, the dry air had chapped his into brittle slates, stealing moisture just as the cold cellar had stolen from him everything else. He had forgotten how luminous skin could seem in the darkness that had managed to seep into his, giving it a sickly pale color. He had even forgotten that eyes could be so kind. In fact, he had forgotten more about people in those two months than most cared to remember in their lifetime.

Yet, he had remembered. He had remembered faceless and nameless people. His mother. His father. Aunt. Cousins. Even second cousins once removed. Feathery dark hair leaned in once again and this time when her lips brushed his, they stuck. They pried open his sealed mouth and a tongue began exploring the chamber inside, as though it were combing through his mind. He fought it but his defenses simpered and crumbled, like some delicate glasswork. And it was in this fashion that Regulus Black was forced to remember an exiled relation.

His eyes widened. Suddenly he pushed the heavily hooded figure away. Almond shaped eyes glittered in the light of the single candle as the dark hood fell away from the force of his feeble act. Softly, coaxingly her body edged closer to his and in that moment it was he who sought refuge in another mouth. Perhaps for this one instant the cellar would take from him his memories. His hand clasped around a lock of her dark hair as the prying tongue once again melted the final barrier and his eyes closed.

He had always wanted to be the favorite. However, his brother had held that position. He was smarter, more playful and even better at quidditch. He was also two years older, but this never seemed to matter to his parents. He was expected to compete regardless and his brother had been completely oblivious. The envy that gurgled in the pit of his stomach each time they preferred him transformed until, one day, he wished his brother would experience it's sting.

But when that chance had come, hesitation had quickly followed. Nevertheless, he had pointed to the tapestry sending his brother's name into flames just as his mother had done with an uncle. He allowed the burning ember to plummet to the ground, where it scorched the floor's sleek surface. A part of him had wished the burn mark would somehow compensate for what he had done. From then on, his parents would insist he had always been their favorite. He had known better than to believe them.

Gasping slightly, he noticed that her body had left his. It could only have been recent. His skin still tingled from as final entrails of warmth she had saturated him with fought and lost to the biting cold of the room. The candle was still burning when he opened his eyes, lighting most of the grave-like chamber he was confined to by his own magic. She stood in the dull fringes between the light and the abyss of his prison. Her dark skin shone in the bare glow of the candle. Upon meeting her eyes, she was next to him once more. He shuddered when he next felt her lips on his bony neck.

His brother had called him a coward once. A coward for accepting the lies their parents had so perfectly hashed out. For caving into the wishes they had imposed even . He had spoken as though there lay more truth in the lies his brother's friends fed him. He wondered if he would say it if he could see him now. Probably. Weakness never was something his brother had truly believed could be cured. But, brave and selfless hearts knew little of the mind's flexibility on such matters. It was only then that he wondered how this woman could stand him or how she had found him.

What he did not know was the she satisfied men more than three times his age on a regular basis. She had seen the Death Eaters haul his filthy figure onto what had once been her finely polished floor. The defiance in his eyes at that time had long died. But when she had glimpsed it, she had wanted to capture it the only way she knew how. And he did not resist. He never asked for her name. She never gave it. He never asked about her blood status. Had she told him and had he the energy, he would have commented on how he had once killed vermin like her before breakfast.

For if there was one thing that Regulus Black could have known for certain as her warm breath gently blew the flame away, it was that he would die in this encasement. He could not know how or when. Such things were not for him to contemplate, much like the majority of his life. His brother would have said that had he chosen the alternative, things would have been different. He did not know that these choices that could have been made had never existed. In many ways his fate had sealed as the ember of parchment ablaze from his mother's wrath had perished into soot. He had only realized this after the dark mark on his forearm had lost its novelty and, perhaps, he had shed some of his naivety.

A soft moan escaped from his insides, almost hoarse from disuse. In her caressing kisses, she had disposed of the sole rag shielding him from the chills of the cellar. He shivered before feeling a large mass hover above him and gently kiss him once again under the warmth of the woman's cloak. His hand brushed down her flat and bare stomach and, before it fell, her delicate hand caught his. He next felt her breasts upon his chest. She quite tenderly met him. Slowly the area under her cloak became warm with their motions, until it reached a nearly stifling heat. Somewhere in the distance, or so it seemed to him, chains that the vaguely recalled his was bound to clanked. His eyes curtained and Regulus remembered only one thing. A hot summer's day bathed in light, humid heat and filled with mosquitoes.

The next sound in the self-sustaining prison, hours later, was the pop of a witch Apparating away. She returned to the wooded land above the cell and walked noiselessly back toward her husband's Death Eater infested mansion, wetting her lips in the glow of the rising sun. They had based themselves in the house for a year now. With the estate being run by a man nearing seventy and the general lack of skill in magic of the remainder of the inhabitants, everyone had known better than to protest. Her intrigue in the man they had hauled to dirty her floors had only begun with the defiance in his eyes. It had increased when they had managed to isolate his magic from his body and, yet, his expression had never wavered. Her interest, however, had held only when one of the masked Death Eaters had called him a traitor. He had continued to say something about 'horcruxes' and the Dark Lord's immortality; things that she did not understand. Traitor, however, she did comprehend. A man that had betrayed the Dark Lord. It was then that her mind had set upon finding him.

Days, weeks, perhaps even months – for Regulus could no longer trust his instinct of time – after he awoke to find that she had left, he remembered. Traitor. Some may have found it a foul word, but in the final rhythms of his heart, he began to believe in its power and its depth. When his eyes closed for a final time, he saw a sunny day. A sunny day in a park, with mosquitoes and his brother. As the last breath shuddered out of his starved and parched corpse he wondered if this was where traitors go when they died. And as a heart finally stilled in a caving cellar, another began to pound with life in a woman's womb; unbeknownst to the future Mrs. Zabini while she brewed the demise of her soon-to-be former husband. Two years later an era of fear fluttered into peace. Mrs. Zabini looked at her mischievous son, a near carbon copy of herself, and pondered whether she too had birthed a traitor.

I would really appreciate feedback!


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